Wedding Invites
by Fezpeanut
Summary: In which Marius, sleep-dazed, invites a friend long since dead to come to his wedding. Based off a tumblr post, used to pull out of a writing slump.


**I wrote this based on a tumblr post that read "Sometimes I wonder if Marius subconsciously wrote Courfeyrac's address on an envelope when he was sending out his wedding invitations, then, realized his mistake half way through and just silently crumpled up the envelope and stared out the window," in an attempt to pull myself out of a writing slump. **

**I'm taking any and all Les Mis prompts/requests that get thrown at me. I'm not really adverse to any pairings or characters, I'd just rather not write, like, gobs and gobs of explicit smut or anything (I'm not good at it, besides).**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

It was not an unusual experience for Marius nowadays, after the fall of the lonely barricade and of his friends and his own hollow rise from the depths of fever and medicine, that he would carry out tasks without conscious action on his own part.

It was as if he was sometimes still caught in the hazy aftermath of gunsmoke and expired powder and the dust of crumbling furniture. The days would start with something simple—picking decorations for their wedding with Cosette or penning invitations, as he was doing now—and before he could finish a proper thought, the minutes or hours would have passed and his task would be left near-complete, half-abandoned and sloppy from his distracted state of mind. He was moving through menial moments in a sleeping trance.

Every now and then he would be able to catch himself in the middle of a daydream. A gunshot would sound in the darkest corners of his mind and he would blink, notice that he was indoors, that days and weeks and months had passed since the night the French National Guard had decended like a flock of vultures upon the students of Paris. That his hand had jerked, and he was holding only a pen. No pistol. That there was a smear of black ink upon his palm instead of red…

Marius felt the bile rise up in his throat at the thought of blood (of everyone's blood, spattered across the streets and stones and in bursts like cockades on the face of General Lamarque's funeral casket) and reached for a cloth. Took it in his shaking hands, smeared and dried the ink across his skin—stopped.

There were trembling words scratched across the almost-center of the invitation envelope beneath his fingers. Just barely legible, smeared by absent hands.

Monsieur Courfeyrac.

The letters worked in to Marius like the stab of a knife: sharp and lancing and straight to the heart. A hollow pain bloomed from the center of his chest and wound up to his shoulder, clawed at the spot where surgeons pried and cut at his muscles to pluck out a leaden bead that sent him tumbling from his perch on the barricade.

He closed his fist around the paper before the anger had a chance to well up in him and spill over, but couldn't bring himself to throw it away. Now that Marius was awake, out of his hazy state of mind, he felt almost incapable of moving an inch. Courfeyrac—his closest friend—had already been thrown away. By bullets, by the smoking muzzles of guns. His life had been wadded up and tossed upon the pile of the dead, as had everyone else's. Enjolras, Combeferre, Grantaire, Joly, Jehan…

Time passed again without his keeping track of the seconds or minutes. When Cosette arrived, peeking through the door to his study and smiling as brightly as she ever could, the light that spilled onto the floor from the hallway was harsh against the gloom. Marius stirred and felt stiff; his bones had rusted and dried into place. His knuckles ached from the tight grip he kept on his pen and on the envelope that he clutched against the desktop.

With a bit of effort, a careful twitch of a tired smile as Cosette stepped into the room, Marius worked his fingers away from the paper and smoothed it down. Tucked it under the rest. It would be delivered by his hand to the spot where they had fallen under the flare of gunpowder as soon as he could find a free moment to visit le Café Musain.

His friends could not be allowed to be thrown away, even after they had gone.


End file.
